Five Years of Accelerating U.S. Decline

Five Years of Accelerating U.S.
Decline

Five years ago,
anti-war forces were in deep depression, having failed to
prevent Bush from launching his illegal war against Iraq.
Pro-war circles were floating on top of the world, imagining
that Washington was about to become the new Rome under an
American arms umbrella that would hold the entire planet in
Shock and Awe. As it turned out, the American offensive was
tied down by indigenous Iraqis – a great defeat for a
superpower. So repulsed was the world at Washington’s
assault on global order and civilization, itself, that the
U.S. has been on a many-fronted free-fall ever since March
30, 2003. This article includes a piece written by our team
on the day of the invasion.

Five Years of
Accelerating U.S. Decline

On
March 20, 2003, the day the U.S. and its “coalition of the
willing” launched the long awaited invasion of Iraq,
leftist groupings in the United States behaved as if the
last vestiges of civilization were crumbling before their
eyes, and that somehow the American anti-war movement was
singularly responsible for failing to hold back Bush’s
legions. Although it is true that U.S. peaceniks have always
harbored wildly inflated assessments of their own importance
on the domestic and world scene, it is a group flaw they
share with Americans of all political persuasions, most of
whom believe themselves to be at the center of the universe,
and therefore the greatest losers or the mightiest warriors
in history, depending on which way the drama unfolds.

“Fat, flatulent pundits seriously
contemplated whether the United States was about to assume
the global responsibilities once borne by ancient
Rome.”

So it was natural that the anti-war
“losers” and bellicose “winners” of March 20, five
years ago, were both wildly out of touch with the probable
consequences of U.S. aggression. Anti-warists seemed to
shrink into little balls of hurt and fear, as if the massive
armed assault would inevitably usher in some multi-decade
U.S. Cowboy Reich. The pro-war crowd convinced itself that
nothing could stop the U.S. military on the march. Fat,
flatulent pundits seriously contemplated whether the United
States was about to assume the global responsibilities once
borne by ancient Rome – and whether that was a good or bad
thing.

Nobody, it seemed, appeared aware of a fundamental
truth known to all professional soldiers. Few antagonists
rush into war unless their own analysis indicates that what
passes for peace is even more dangerous. Wars are initiated,
in the main, by desperate men, who envision ever more
threatening scenarios mounting, one after the other, unless
they ACT to take the initiative out of fate’s hands and
into their own.

The U.S. government was terrified of
allowing the status quo to continue in the Middle East. By
not decisively “winning” (as only militaries can do),
the Americans were losing…something. One would have to
deploy companies of military psychiatrists to strap down and
massively drug Bush’s entire inner war council to assemble
a picture of the nightmare scenarios that caused Washington
to roll the dice under such unfavorable circumstances.
Literally no one except Israel wanted the U.S. to succeed in
a thrust that was designed to bring U.S. forces deep into
the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. Anything less
than a total victory, would be viewed as a superpower
defeat. The worst conceivable scenario – that indigenous
Iraqi forces would stop the Americans in their tracks –
was so unthinkable that the Americans refused to think about
it – guaranteeing that, over time, the U.S. would suffer a
total military and diplomatic debacle.

Here's what we
wrote:

They Have Reached Too Far

Bush's Road Leads to Ruin For Himself and His
Pirates

Thus, on the early morning of March
20, 2003 as our little team at Black Commentator published
its first issue of the Iraq war, we saw clearly that the
United States, like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote,
had just jumped off a cliff into some immeasurable canyon of
doom. Here we are all assembled, the world's people,
awaiting the Pirates' lunge at history. The Bush men have
made sure we pay rapt attention to their Big Bang, their
epochal Event, after which the nature of things will have
changed unalterably to their advantage - they think. The
Bush men are certain of our collective response, convinced
that once we have witnessed The Mother of All War Shows,
humanity will react according to plan, and submit.

Bush
was already savoring the New American Century just days ago,
when he summoned his underlings from Britain and Spain to
the Azores to make yet another final pronouncement. "
We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for
the world," Bush said.

Spoken like a King. Or The Man
Who Would Be King.

Rudyard Kipling's tale of
an English colonial soldier drunk on his imagined power over
the natives is eerily appropriate. The projected fruits of
Shock and Awe - the power to pillage the world with impunity
- utterly bedazzled and blinded the perpetrators of the
staged holocaust, even before the Event itself had unfolded.
In the days between the final U.S. ultimatum and the
invasion, American political and corporate media players
were visibly shaken by the clear and unanimous world
revulsion at U.S. imperiousness.

"Are we going back to
The White Man's Burden?" Arab League UN Ambassador Yahya
Mahmassani shot at CNN's startled Wolf Blitzer. "Is this the
21st Century?" Yes, it is, and George Bush and his armies
cannot wrench away the provenance of Time to lift again the
Burden that even Kipling knew the White Man was not fit to
bear.

No one can predict the specific ways in which
nations and movements will resist Bush's aggression against
civilization. What is certain is that the Pirates have
succeeded in arraying important sectors of every other
nation on the planet in opposition to Washington's hegemony.
Bush has made the name that is our patrimony - "America" - a
curse on the lips of much of the world.

If Shock and Awe
is essentially a horrific psychological warfare exercise -
and it is - the assault on humanity's collective
sensibilities has already had disastrous, unintended
effects.

Although they are incapable of realizing it, the
Bush men have revealed themselves to the world - the
audience for Shock and Awe - as grotesquely ugly, brutish,
irredeemably repugnant human beings whose touch must be
avoided under all circumstances. Every plan and project of
individuals and nations will be shaped by having witnessed a
racist America raining fire on a weaker people - and
reveling in the crime.

Bush's plan for world domination
was doomed before the burning, blasting, thundering,
screaming display. The Pirates have accelerated the
processes of their own ruin.

The impending war against Iraq is
an oil currency war, a preemptive strike against the
euro's potential to challenge the U.S. dollar as the sole
denominator of petroleum purchases. By seizing the Iraqi oil
fields and positioning itself to do the same in Saudi
Arabia, Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf, the Caspian
Sea and South Asia, the U.S. can stop the euro cold and rule
as its own OPEC, awesomely armed and dreadfully
dangerous. The dollar will remain supreme, backed by the oil
reserves of the globe.”

That was the
plan. However, as the world watched the U.S. morph into its
predatory essence month by month, a collective, global
withdrawal from America became apparent. Clyde V. Prestowitz
Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute and author
of the forthcoming book "Rogue Nation," describes the
phenomenon.

Over the past year, private foreign
investment in the United States has fallen dramatically. It
has been partially offset by increased buying of U.S.
Treasury notes by Asian governments. But, at the same time,
some governments like Russia have also begun to shift some
of their reserve currency holdings from dollars to euros. As
a result, we have seen the dollar fall in value against the
euro by about 25 percent. That kind of a decline occurs when
foreigners decide to put their money someplace other than
the United States.

War is the great and terrible engine
of history. Bush and his Pirates hope to employ that engine
to harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy, to
leapfrog over the contradictions of their parasitical
existence into a new epoch of their own imagining.

Instead, they have lunged into the abyss, from which no
one will extricate them, for they will be hated much more
than feared.

In attempting to break humanity's will to
resist, the Bush pirates have reached too
far.

Five Years LaterBy
any measurement, the United States has declined beyond
imagining, since March 20, 2003. The Bush Pirates have,
indeed, vastly “accelerated the processes of their own
ruin.” The objective conditions for continued western
imperialist rule have damn near disappeared. And yet only a
few months ago, the Bush regime was set to roll the dice one
again in the Middle East, this time with an attack on Iran
under conditions infinitely less favorable to the U.S. than
the face-off with Iraq five years before. Only a veritable
mutiny by Pentagon generals and professional intelligence
agents prevented Bush from making another date with
apocalypse.

Humanity is at greatest danger when the old
regime feels its power to be slipping away. The rich
are different from the rest of us. Most of us simply
want to live decent lives. But for the super-rich, loss of
decisive power over the bulk of humanity amounts to social
death. As they view the world, one either rules, or dies.

“Only a veritable mutiny by Pentagon
generals and professional intelligence agents prevented Bush
from making another date with
apocalypse.”

Bush and his Pirates can no
longer hope to successfully employ the engines of war to
“harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy.”
But they can commit suicide. The time to fear the generals
is not when they swagger and pound their chests. It’s when
they start pissing their pants for no damn good reason but
the horror film rolling in their heads.

The world is
closer than it has ever been to an epic of global
cooperation. It is now generally understood by ever larger
masses of people that absent a regime of routine planetary
collaboration, civilization is doomed. Most leaders of the
nations of the world are also aware that the transition from
half a millennium of European capitalist domination to
something resembling a global family of nations may be the
most dangerous phase humanity has ever encountered.

That
is because the destroyers of civilizations are at their most
murderous when their own mortality can no longer be avoided.
Washington is full of such creatures. We must find ways to
confine them, or they will try to kill us all.

*************

BAR
Executive editor Glen Ford can be reached at
Glen.Ford(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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